What Does Psalm 88:15 Mean?

I am bowed low and breathing out my last from my youth. I carry your terrors, and I am faint.

Psalm 88:15 · SDV

Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.

Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.

This verse in the King James

King James wording

King James Version

I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up: while I suffer thy terrors I am distracted.

THE KEY

The word translated “suffer” means “carry”: this is a life lived under a weight the speaker traces back to youth.

THE MEANING

The pain reaches back to youth; death feels close, and God’s terrors leave you disoriented. The verse speaks that reality aloud before God without explaining it away or supplying a resolution.

THE ROOT

נָשָׂאתִי

nāśāʾtî

GROWS FROM

נשא

nāśāʾ

To lift, carry, or bear.

“carry” in this verse is nāśāʾtî. The Hebrew nāśāʾtî (⁨נָשָׂאתִי⁩, “I have carried”) gives “suffer” the image of bearing a weight across time. Its branch massāʾ (⁨מַשָּׂא⁩, “burden”) shares the same root, making the terrors something carried, not only felt.

ALSO GROWS

massāʾ: Burden, load.

מַשָּׂא

This branch names what can be carried; the terrors in the verse weigh on the speaker over time.

nōśēʾ: One who carries or bears.

נֹשֵׂא

This participle presents carrying as an ongoing state, echoing the speaker’s long burden.

THE PATTERN

Lament speaks the full force of suffering to God without waiting for it to be resolved.

Therefore I do not hold back my mouth. I speak in the narrow place of my breath; I murmur in the bitterness of my living soul.

Job 7:11 · SDVJob gives anguish and bitterness direct speech before God, without softening either.

To the chief Musician upon Aijeleth Shahar, A Psalm of David. My God, my God, why do you leave me? Far from my deliverance are the words of my roaring.

Psalm 22:1 · SDVThe speaker voices abandonment and distress to God as they are felt.

Around the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani? My God, my God, why have you left me behind?

Matthew 27:46 · SDVJesus’s cry gives the same anguished lament words without resolving them in the moment.

THE THREAD

Surely he has borne our sicknesses, and carried our wounds. Yet we reckoned him struck, beaten by God, and bowed low.

Isaiah 53:4 · SDV

The Hebrew verb nāśāʾ (⁨נָשָׂא⁩, “carry” or “bear”) appears in both: here the speaker has borne God’s terrors, and there the servant bears griefs and sorrows. That shared root lets the language of burden echo across the verses while Psalm 88 keeps its unresolved pain intact.

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